[epf-dev] epf composer and content entry

[Christian Nentwich <christian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

All,

Here's some feedback for you on EPF Composer, and some questions.

The tool seems very much oriented towards maintenance and maintaining 
structural/model integrity, and it is good at that. However, to be 
frank, it's not very useful for new content creation at the moment, 
because a) it's not oriented towards data entry and b) the structural 
overhead would put process analysts off.

In the project at hand, we are documenting existing processes and trying 
to capture them in EPF. There are _hundreds_ of work products, roles and 
tasks. Right click -> New, with a persistence call every time leading to 
a three second delay is just not feasible, never mind asking process 
managers unfamiliar with the tool to choose readable as well as internal 
names. They want to be able to set up their roles, tasks, etc., fast - 
maintaining process information is already a burden, making it harder is 
not a good idea from our point of view.

Our users now maintain the method content in a spreadsheet, which we 
have written an importer for. Does the EPF project have any plans to 
facilitate rapid data entry? Am I describing a use case that is just not 
what the project is intended for (i.e. is it intended for browsing and 
tweaking standard processes like OpenUP)?

thanks,

Christian